Jobs drying up for the disabled

Workforce participation is under the spotlight.

By Hamish Townsend

December 1, 2008 — 11.21am

Australia's poor record in accepting disabled people into the mainstream workforce will be put under the spotlight at a national conference on education in Melbourne this week. The Pathways 9 conference, which opens today, will hear that despite big changes in attitudes and 10 years of booming economic growth, the employment prospects of disabled students have not improved since the early '90s.

"It's a failure of leadership in government, pure and simple," the chairman of Vision Australia, Kevin Murfitt, says.

Vison Australia’s Kevin Murfitt says disabled people seeking work are being let down by government.Credit:Eddie Jim

According to figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the number of disabled students attending school increased by 93 per cent between 1981 and 2003, yet the same study showed that between 1988 and 2003 there was no significant increase in workforce participation.

Between 1998 and 2003, the number of people with a severe or profound disability in the workforce dropped by 21,200. The figures to 2008 are not believed to show any improvement.

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The Pathways 9 conference agenda will focus on managing and mentoring the often difficult transitions for disabled people from home to school to workplace.

The Federal Government is developing a national mental health and disability employment strategy to improve job prospects for the disabled. Labor's parliamentary secretary for disabilities, Bill Shorten, has labelled the present situation a "disgrace" and compared it unfavourably to the equity issues that confront indigenous communities.

Dr Murfitt, however, remains cautiously optimistic.

"One of the terrible things about the recent (employment statistics for the disabled) is that the governments have been the worst of the lot. Public service positions have halved from 6 per cent to 3 per cent," he says.

Dr Murfitt is part of a generation of disabled people who stormed out of universities in the '80s and '90s, pushing into the professions and challenging the limitations placed on them. He has been blind since the late '80s, when a car accident took his sight from one eye and a degenerative condition called sympathetic ophthalmia affected his other eye.

He is a man unused to giving in to impediments. Among his many achievements is to have once been the world blind water ski jumping champion.

He attended the first Pathways conference 18 years ago as a student. This week he returns as a keynote speaker along with Caroline Bowditch, a professional dancer in Europe with the Scottish Dance Theatre.

She has a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta - a brittle bone disease that caused her to have 150 fractures before she was eight. "I'm in the UK because the opportunities I craved are just not around in Australia. Both the arts and empowering people with disabilities is taken much more seriously over here, there is more money put into both - it's a shame," she says.

The general manager of equity programs at Melbourne University, Matthew Brett, expects spirited debates among the conference's 300 delegates.

Like Dr Murfitt, he sniffs change and opportunity but also a change in the debates disabled people need to have, including greater political engagement.

People with disabilities have spent decades fighting against their conditions being depicted in medical terms and their being thought of as somehow sick, deformed or a burden.

"This debate has been far too polarised over the last 10 or 15 years," Mr Brett says.

"It has led to a lack of a mainstream dialogue and a failure of the disability rights movement to make headway.

"We need to acknowledge both sides of the argument and create some middle ground.

"We all have a long way to go and we're missing what these kids have to offer in the process."

Ms Bowditch is more direct. "It's flabbergasting that workplace statistics in Australia have gone backwards," she says.

"There must be a lot of employers out there who are badly missing out."